25 coolest athletes: Ilie Nastase

Whether you were a spectator or his opponent, you never knew what to expect when he was playing.

Bud Collins once said that the tennis code of conduct should have been called the “Nastase Act” after the man who inspired it. “The Bucharest Buffoon” and “Nasty” are just two of the nicknames the biggest crowd-puller of his generation earned.

Whether you were a spectator or an opponent, you had no idea what to expect when Nastase was playing. Humour, mimicry, anger, rage were all on the menu for the original bad boy in a gentlemen’s game. He once mooned a referee and even threw a shoe at a linesman who called a foot fault. His antics cost him a fair number of matches, but when he was on song, he was a magician with the racket – one of the most talented players to have ever played the game.

Off the court, Nastase had yet another nickname: “Sex Legend”. His own estimate of the number of women he had slept with was somewhere between 800 and 900. While McEnroe and Connors were bad boys on court, too, out of his tennis whites – quite literally – no one else had quite what Nastase had. A Knight of France’s Legion d’honneur, love him or hate him, you had to watch him.

To mark the London Olympics, GQ's July issue features the 25 coolest athletes of all time. Get your copy at a local newsstand or subscribe here.